Minorities in Picture Books by Dooley and Hoffman
Uploaded by snwboarder on Oct 27, 2011
This essay discusses the portrayal of minorities in the works of Norah Dooley and Mary Hoffman.
I Introduction
The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. The mixture of various ethnic groups, religions, cultures and belief systems that characterizes the country has been one of its greatest strengths, but it has also caused a lot of misunderstanding and difficulty, prejudice, hatred and fear.
Children learn from their parents, their peers and their teachers: they learn tolerance and kindness; but they can also learn bigotry. It’s therefore very important that they learn that everyone has value. A recent trend in children’s books is most welcome: these works show that everyone can learn from other cultures; that there’s nothing to fear; and that we work best when we work together.
II Plots
The books that most directly explore the idea of cultures learning from each other is the series by Norah Dooley, comprised of Everybody Cooks Rice, Everybody Bakes Bread, and Everybody Serves Soup, among others. (I was only able to find the first, Everybody Cooks Rice, but descriptions of the other indicate the plots are similar.)
In this book, Carrie (a girl who may be about 12) goes to find her little brother Anthony because it’s time for dinner. Anthony, it turns out, has stopped at all the neighbor’s houses, and stays one step ahead of Carrie until the end of the book. Like Anthony, Carrie also stops at each house, and samples the dinner while she’s there. In this way, the author introduces us to the cooking that is typical of the country the neighbors came from; she also tells us indirectly that this is a widely divergent group of people all living happily within a few doors of one another.
Carrie stops first at the Darlington’s; they turn out to be from Barbados. From there she goes to the Diazes’ house; they’re from Puerto Rico. They send her to the Tran’s (Vietnamese), but Anthony has already left for the Hua’s (Chinese). On her way there, she’s stopped by her friend Rajit Krishnamurthy (Indian), who is carrying a meal to his parents at their shop. He confirms that Anthony went to the Hua’s.
When she gets there, of course, he’s already gone, this time to the Bleus, who are from Haiti. Their cat has just had kittens, and Anthony has...